The Most Magnificent Idea

Ashley Spires has brought back the unnamed heroine from The Most Magnificent Thing (www.cmreviews.ca/cm/vol20/no36/themostmagnicentthing.html) to demonstrate how ideas can germinate and be brought to life with persistence and, sometimes, a bit of serendipity.

The brain of this “regular girl” is usually bubbling over with ideas, but one day, when inspiration fails to strike, she goes for a walk around the neighbourhood. Nothing provides a spark although she enjoys some local sights and does a good deed by returning a lost grey kitten to its elderly owner.

The youngster reviews some of her previous successful projects, but she is determined to come up with a brand new idea. If nothing is coming easily to mind, perhaps involving herself in another activity will help. She hangs upside down from the playground equipment, plays her tuba and engages her ever-present companion, a small tan and brown bulldog, in a game of chess. The creative juices still fail to flow.

When a trip for some new supplies to jumpstart the process gives her nothing but a mess of overturned cartons, she is really downcast.

Without ideas taking up space, her brain fills
up with sad instead.
“What if I NEVER have an idea EVER again?”

Moping on the sidewalk, the girl finds that same little grey cat hiding in a box. Our girl returns the cat to the grateful owner and voila! At last! An idea is born. One measuring tape, a hammer and nails and a length of chicken wire later she has completed a cat tower built around the tree outside the lady’s house and enclosed so that the small feline can enjoy being out in the fresh air in safety.

The next morning, her idea machine is running at top speed.
She might not have new ideas every day, but she trusts that
they will happen eventually. Some of those ideas will be good.
Some of them will be great. But each day that she gets to make
things will be MAGNIFICENT.

Spires has deftly captured the moods and methods of a small girl who values originality above all else. The message here is clearly, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’. Although the overall tone of the story is light, readers can feel for this young inventor who is, temporarily at least, stymied in coming up with any ideas.

The backdrops to the story are shown in crisp black and white lines drawn with geometric precision while the main character, sporting a red tunic, leggings and brown hair tied in bunches, moves solidly through the pages, variously demonstrating worry, energy, disappointment, and joy. The quizzical expressions of the little dog observing all this are priceless. The author’s sense of humour is demonstrated in the note on the page containing the publication details. Here, she describes her art as being “rendered digitally in Photoshop after repeated room tidyings, many hours staring out of the window and one existential crisis”.

Public and school libraries will want to add The Most Magnificent Idea to their storybook shelves.